.

Five

(In which Juvia teaches Lyon a craft and receives an invitation.)

When Lyon trudged inside his home with a brace of fish slung over his back after another hard day of work, he was greeted by the mouthwatering scent of…something. Dinner, undoubtedly. His nose wasn't very good, unfortunately, possibly from smelling fish day in and day out. So although he could identify the smell of cooking fish, the rest was a mystery to him.

Still, it was infinitely better than the stench of burning he'd come home to yesterday.

"I'm home!" he called, kicking off his boots by the door. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet as he padded into the kitchen. "Something smells good."

Juvia turned away from the stove to give him a beaming smile. A neatly filleted fish sizzled merrily in the pan, crusted in…herbs, probably, although Lyon kept few spices around the house due to his lack of cooking expertise and deadened taste buds. A smaller pan was layered with carrots and potatoes. Two pots were crammed on the range top as well, one shallow and one deeper. Lyon tipped up the lid of the former to find half a dozen mussels cooking in broth and the latter to find two small crabs boiling in water.

"Where did you get these from?" he asked as he dropped the lid. Fish could always be found around the kitchen, but he only brought home mussels and crabs on occasion. Juvia gestured vaguely to the other side of the cottage, where a window looked out to sea.

"You got them out of the ocean?"

Juvia shook her head and moved her hands in a 'smaller' motion, like a shrinking circle. What was that supposed to mean? Some kind of pond? A bathtub?

"Oh," he said with a flash of inspiration. "Were you out gathering in the tide pools?"

Her face lit up, and she nodded emphatically. A number of tide pools nestled in the rocks where they met the beach and ocean. They were covered by the waves at high tide, but were easy pickings once the tide went out. All sorts of seaweed, anemones, starfish, and, yes, mussels and crabs could be found there. Lyon occasionally went down to find something to supplement his dinner, but the rocks could be slippery and treacherous.

Especially if someone had, say, a broken ankle.

"You should be more careful," he said. "It can be dangerous around there, and you shouldn't be climbing in all the rocks with a broken ankle." Juvia's face fell, and he hurried to soften his scolding. "But it looks really good. We'll eat well tonight."

Juvia smiled shyly, and Lyon relaxed with a sigh of relief. The last thing he wanted to do was alienate her. Or make her feel bad when she had been trying to do something nice for him.

"But I thought you couldn't cook? That's not fair! How can you cook better than me when you've been living in the ocean where you don't have to cook anything?"

Juvia winked and held a finger to her lips before turning back to the stove with a silent laugh. Honestly, she was a kitchen disaster one day and a five-star chef the next. Some strange selkie magic?

"Did you take your medicine and rewrap your ankle?" he asked.

Juvia nodded. Lyon snatched a chair from the table and dragged it across the floor with the grating shriek of wood on wood just in case. At least she could sit down if her foot started bothering her again.

"Well, you seem like you have things under control here. I'm just going to clean the fish before dinner, alright?"

Juvia nodded again, and Lyon left the kitchen in her apparently capable hands to traipse out back. A rough-hewn table stood a short distance from the back wall for just this purpose, and he unslung the fish from his shoulder to toss them onto its surface. He worked quickly and efficiently, knife slitting the first fish's belly in one smooth motion. Scooping water from the barrel of rainwater tucked beside the table, he washed out the fish and removed the guts. He sliced the fish open fully and peeled off the skin with all its glimmering silver scales before cutting the flesh into neat fillets and moving on to the next.

The slick blood on his hands and guts piled off to the side were second-nature to him, as was the salty, metallic smell of fish and blood. He was long since past the point of squeamishness.

He had first learned to clean and gut a fish when he was eight. He couldn't help but smile at the memory even now. His mother had marched him and his brother out back to this very table, only to realize that they were too short to see over the top. But she was determined that her boys would learn an important life skill that day, so she dragged out chairs, selected a fish, and demonstrated the process in all its gory detail. She had shown them how to scale a fish or how to remove its entire skin, how to get out the bones, how to fillet different kinds of fish, where to cut on each species.

Then she handed poor little Lyon the razor-sharp knife and told him to fillet the next fish without cutting himself. He had refused, but Ur was nothing if not stubborn, and she had determined that he was ready. His first attempt mangled the poor fish, but his mother just handed him another and patiently guided him through until he could do it right.

And then she had turned on Gray, who was only seven at the time. He cried and wailed, but Ur was implacable and insisted he try. Then he had thrown up all over the cleaning table, which had been the end of the lesson.

A soft laugh escaped Lyon's lips as he set the fillets aside and cleaned off the knife and table. Gray wasn't cut out for gutting fish. He never had gotten over his squeamishness, much to Ur's despair. No wonder he had apprenticed to an artisan and devoted himself to the crafts he loved instead.

Lyon's smile turned wistful as he gathered up his cleaned fish and headed back inside. He missed those days spent arguing over who had to clean the fish, Gray always adamantly refusing until Lyon gave up and did it himself. He missed his mother's tough-love tactics that had pushed him and his brother out of their comfort zone before she gathered them into her arms at the end and whispered 'I'm proud of you' into their hair.

He seemed to be growing distressingly maudlin these days. Maybe it came from having someone else in the house instead of being on his own all the time. It would be lonely when Juvia left, until he grew used to the solitude again like those first heart-wrenching months after he'd lost his mother and Gray. At this rate, he might have to marry Sherry sooner rather than later.

By the time he put the fish away in the icebox and washed his hands, Juvia had already set dinner on the table. She beamed with pride as he ogled the offering. It was a veritable feast given his long dependence on stew and the recent dearth of foodstuffs in the house.

The fish melted in his mouth, the flesh tender and flaky and washed clean of its strong musky taste before being flavored with herbs he probably didn't even know the names of. The mussels were steamed perfectly, the crab meat was well-seasoned, and even the vegetables were delicious with their glaze instead of tasting like dirt clods. Although he suspected the latter might be due to the fact that Juvia spent more time washing and peeling them than he ever did.

And this from the girl who had managed to burn stew yesterday.

"This is delicious!" Lyon said fervently. "I can't believe you made all this. How did you learn to cook?"

Juvia just smiled to herself and looked suitably mysterious. Lyon thought that maybe he should stop talking for a few days to see if he picked up the same mystique she had. Although maybe it wouldn't work as well for him since he wasn't a beautiful woman. It was hard to tell.

"Thank you," he added. "It's nice to come home and not have to worry about finding food. It was thoughtful of you."

Juvia looked mightily pleased with herself, at least until Lyon insisted on washing the dishes himself since she had cooked. Once he had successfully quashed her silent protests, he got to work scrubbing pots in hot, soapy water. Juvia pulled her chair back over to keep him company, and he regaled her with tales of that day's adventures. Those adventures mostly consisted of Yuka still refusing to talk about fixing the boat and Toby refusing to stop talking about the new puppies, so he quickly switched to the old town favorites about people whose lives were more interesting than his.

He waited to ask what she had been up to until he had run the towel over the last of the plates and tucked it away safely in its cupboard. Since she couldn't talk, he figured she would either show him or launch into another energetic fit of charades, both of which would require his visual attention.

She grinned and jumped up as soon as the words left his mouth, stumbling only slightly. Waving off Lyon's concern, she grabbed his wrist and tugged him back to the living room. Her hands were small and soft, pale and delicate against his rough, tanned skin. It felt strange to have her fingers curled around his pulse, his heartbeat drumming against her fingertips, but not entirely unpleasant.

Juvia dragged him to the table in the living room, where her shell collection had been augmented by several dozen new arrivals. The conch shell he had given her sat in a place of prominence, surrounded by its smaller brethren.

"Shell collecting again?" Lyon asked as he surveyed her haul. "At this rate, you're going to take over my whole house with shells."

Juvia huffed out a breath in something like a pout before her smile returned and she grabbed something from the table to hold out to him. She had made…a picture frame. Lyon's gaze darted to the picture of himself and Gray that his mother had drawn, the one he had shown Juvia the other day in the sloppy frame he had made for it.

This was a better version of that. Juvia had found some kind of driftwood and fitted it into a rectangular frame decorated with flatter, pearlescent shells placed artfully along the border while twine looped and twisted around like rope.

"You just had to one-up me, huh?" Lyon said with a rueful twist of his lips. "You did a really good job, although I have no idea what you found to attach everything."

Juvia smiled and poked at Lyon's chest with her finger before pointing back at the frame.

"What? Yeah, I made one too, although yours is better."

She rolled her eyes, a gesture out of place against her usual demure sweetness but hinting at the feistiness he'd glimpsed when first taking her skin, and shoved the frame into his hands.

"Oh. It's for me?"

She nodded emphatically. Almost as an afterthought, she snatched the conch off the table and ran her finger over it as she raised a meaningful eyebrow.

Lyon laughed despite himself. "Point taken, although you don't owe me anything. Hm… Should I switch out the picture, then?"

Juvia shook her head and mimed drawing in the air.

"You want to draw your own picture?" he asked. A nod. "Um… Okay. You're welcome to try. I never had an artistic eye, but my brother had his own art kit he made up. Let me grab that for you, and you can play with it."

Their mother had indulged Gray's artistic interest since she'd had some herself, and he had taken full advantage, both during his free time and as a way to get out of menial work and chores. Lyon had never paid much attention to how all that artsy stuff worked, but Gray had somehow come into possession of a good quantity of art supplies that he both obtained somehow and personally manufactured out of goodness knew what. It had seemed like just another one of Gray's frivolous pastimes, but now Lyon wondered if perhaps they would have gotten along better if he had at least attempted to understand his brother's interests.

Gray had taken some of his supplies and most of his work with him when he'd snuck out and disappeared, but he had left behind the bulk of it in order to travel light. Lyon fetched the box tucked beneath his bed and carefully swept part of Juvia's shell collection to the other side of the table so that he had room to remove the lid and show her the contents. Different kinds and colors of pencils nestled alongside a thick sheaf of untouched paper. There were other things that Lyon didn't understand the uses of, but Gray had always preferred the control and precision he could achieve with pencil, and therefore the pencils were all Lyon really cared about.

"You can use these if you want. It's too bad Gray took all his work and sketchbooks with him. He was really good…could sit for hours and just draw people or the sea or whatever happened to wander past."

Lyon drifted over to the side table, but paused as he noticed that the tools and mementos he'd left lying about haphazardly had been rearranged neatly. There was a conspicuous lack of dust coating the table and the objects littering its surface.

"Were you cleaning?" He turned back to Juvia with a frown, and she shrugged and nodded. "You really don't have to. I mean, I know I'm kind of a slob. If it's that bad, I can clean things up for you."

Juvia's eyes widened in an almost comical manner as she shook her head frantically. She launched into a series of elaborate hand gestures that left Lyon's head spinning. He wondered if perhaps she was just bored being left at home all day and that explained all the crafts and cooking and cleaning. But he didn't know what else she could really do while he was gone, and she seemed content enough with that eclectic mix of endeavors and her beachcombing.

"It's okay, it's okay! I'm not offended." Lyon laughed and picked up the paper tucked halfway underneath the picture frame displaying his mother's drawing. Juvia's eyes gleamed with curiosity, and Lyon realized she had to have seen it while cleaning.

The paper was old and crinkled. He had attempted to smooth it out many times, but being crumpled into a ball had left it with a rough, leathery texture no matter what he did. The two figures on it were crudely drawn with distorted bodies and asymmetrical faces. Children drawn by a child's hand.

"This was one of the first things he drew, back when he was maybe six or seven." Lyon collapsed into the armchair, rubbing the worn paper between his fingers. "He was so excited when he gave it to me. 'Look, it's us! I drew us, Lyon!' But even then I thought drawing was silly and boring, and I was too good to play silly games with my baby brother, you know? I told him it was stupid and crumpled it up and threw it out. Looking back, I guess he really looked up to me and was always looking for approval. Maybe even later, once he always acted like I annoyed him and we fought all the time. But I didn't really think about that then.

"When he ran off for good, he left this on the kitchen table. I didn't even realize it had survived. He must've rescued it and kept it all those years. I'd totally forgotten until I saw it again, but I guess the whole incident always meant more to him. He was leaving a message, I guess."

You never cared about me the way you should have. You didn't care about me then, and now you're throwing all your hate at me and it's too much and I'm finished. I'm finished with you.

Juvia placed a hand over his, and Lyon started out of his reverie to find himself staring into her wide, sad eyes. He cleared his throat awkwardly, past the lump he hadn't realized had formed, and attempted a smile.

"Sorry. I don't know where that came from. I didn't mean to get sentimental."

Juvia's eyes were solemn as she placed her palm flat against Lyon's chest, pointed to the dark-haired boy in the picture, and cupped her hands into the shape of a heart. She tilted her head as if in question.

Lyon's smile was watery. "Yeah," he mumbled, voice thick. "I love him."

Juvia put her finger to the page and moved it in a small circle around the point where the two lopsided boys held hands. She tapped the dark-haired boy again, pointed to Lyon, and formed her hands back into a heart.

"I hope so," Lyon said quietly, even though she hadn't made it into a question with her normal head tilt or raised eyebrow. Shaking his head, he leaned over to deposit the picture back onto the side table. "Anyway, you should've seen his later art. He was scary good. Man, I wish I could draw half as well as him. Then you could show me how to make your fancy frames and I could draw something for Sherry."

Juvia's head tilted again, eyes big and doe-like and filled to the brim with both curiosity and the sea.

"Ah, she's one of my oldest friends. I told you a little about her, right? How we ran around with Toby and Yuka? Her birthday is coming up, so I need to get her a gift. Sadly, anything too artistic is probably out of the question. It's too bad—she would have really liked it."

Juvia pursed her lips in thought, but then her face lit up and she pulled the chain of shells from around her neck and handed it to him. Lyon blinked at it blankly. He hadn't even noticed that she'd found some kind of string and made jewelry out of some of the shells. Sherry always teased him about being unobservant, not noticing when she cut her hair or wore something new or had moved everything around to see how long it would take him to notice, and apparently she was right. As usual.

He opened his mouth to voice that particular failing of his, but a flash of inspiration struck him halfway through. "Actually, that's a great idea! It has to be a lot simpler than anything else I've come up with, so I might be able to manage. I'm sure she'd like it. You'll show me how you did it, won't you?"

Juvia nodded and tried to hand him the necklace, but he shook his head.

"Keep it. That's yours. I think it will be more meaningful if I make it myself. I can collect some shells, and you can show me how to do it."

Juvia jumped up, practically beaming, and tugged at his arm urgently.

"Huh?" Lyon stood and watched, puzzled, as she rushed to the front door, still favoring her injured ankle but moving much faster than he thought she really ought to. She opened the door and disappeared outside, and Lyon hurried after her. "Where are you–? We don't have to collect them now."

She just gave him a cheeky grin that might as well have said 'no time like the present', and not even his protests about her ankle could slow her down. The sky was already darkening, but apparently she figured the last few twilit minutes would be wasted if they weren't used for shell gathering.

Kicking off her shoes, she pranced through the surf barefooted and pointed out all the best places to find shells. She swooped down often to snatch one out of the sand as the water rushed back out to sea, and added to her own collection while coaching Lyon on his.

Lyon had less enthusiasm for the process, but obediently squinted through the gloom to search for shells in the muck. Wet sand squelched under his boots and sucked at the soles, and his back, already sore after a day of manual labor on the boat, ached from frequently leaning down to get a closer look.

Juvia, through a series of hand gestures and a hastily constructed system of one to five stars using her fingers, showed him which types of shells would work best for the project they had in mind. Lyon resolved to bring a bag next time, because his pockets and hands could only hold so much.

He paused and smiled at Juvia as she danced through the gloom. Something about her excitement was infectious. Something about the way she was so curious and interested in everything.

Lyon barely even gave sea shells a second look anymore. He had grown up with the sand and shells and sea, and maybe he took them for granted. He hardly noticed them, but Juvia's excitement made him see them in a way that he hadn't in a long time.

And there might be something a little sad about a stranded selkie lingering at the very edges of her beloved ocean, but right now Lyon found it beautiful. She belonged out here with the sea and the sand, prancing through both as if she owned them. It might be hard, Lyon decided, to let her go.

But for now, he was content to watch her claim both the land and ocean as she danced in the dark.

The one saving grace was that Juvia wasn't a natural drawing genius. If she picked that up as quickly as she had with crafting and cooking, Lyon might have had a heart attack. When he came home after a long day of work, he would find crumpled papers and half-drawn pictures littering the living room. At the very least, it meant she was sitting down and resting her ankle for a good part of the day now.

Aside from when she was making dinner, obviously, because Lyon always came home to increasingly creative and delicious meals. And, of course, aside from when she was wandering the beach with him, which they did after dinner until it got dark. Once it was too dark for shell hunting, they retired back to the house and Juvia gave Lyon lessons in jewelry making.

Lyon turned out to be exceedingly bad at jewelry making. On one hand, that shouldn't be a surprise given his natural lack of talent for anything even vaguely artistic. On the other, stringing shells together should be simple enough, even for him.

It didn't help that Juvia found great amusement in this failing, but at least she was a patient teacher.

Lyon had painstakingly strung two necklaces and discarded a good many more shells he had broken during the process. He practiced on the less than perfect shells until he finally started getting the hang of it, then chose the prettier and more unique ones to include in the finished product. Juvia was instrumental in showing him how to arrange them to achieve maximum artistic effect, and even found an almost perfect sand dollar to serve as a pendant for one.

Lyon planned to collect a few more shells to make a couple of bracelets and complete the collection—he didn't want Sherry to think that he'd taken the easy way out and just spent a few minutes throwing some shells on a string—and Juvia would set aside her attempts at drawing to help him out.

After dinner on Thursday, she finally revealed her masterpiece. Her drawing depicted the two of them curled in opposite armchairs in the sitting room, Lyon talking and gesturing with his hands while Juvia fingered the conch and watched him with wide eyes as she hung off every word. On a technical level, it was nowhere near as good as Gray, or even their mother. They'd had a knack for capturing every detail with such precision that everything bloomed to life on the page. But although Juvia's drawing was less skillful, there was a cheerful exuberance and spark woven throughout each stroke.

She held it out to him with a shy smile and hopeful eyes.

"Wow," he said. "Gray would've loved you. It's really good." Juvia beamed like she'd won first place in a competition, and he added, "Is this what you want to put in the frame you made?"

She started to nod, but froze halfway through. After a moment of hesitation, she padded back across the room to pull Gray's old drawing off the table. She stared down at it and then offered it to Lyon.

Lyon swallowed hard as he took it and ran his thumb over the soft, crinkled paper. "Are you sure?"

Juvia nodded and fetched the empty frame. Her eyes said, if it's that important to you, then it should be the one you honor.

He didn't disagree, but he stopped her and instead peeled the picture his mother had drawn out of the old frame he'd made all those years ago. Juvia had carved some kind of groove along the inner edges of her frame to insert a picture, but Lyon was less ingenious and had just used an adhesive to attach his mother's picture to the back of his frame. When he managed to detach it, he gave it to Juvia to fit into her frame and fetched the adhesive to affix Gray's old drawing to his own old frame.

It seemed more fitting to him, to see the sloppy, lopsided child's drawing in an ugly, messy frame of splintered wood and ill-placed sea shells. Two imperfections bound together, one from Gray and one from Lyon. Maybe a sign that they had both cared enough to try.

I did love you, he wanted to say. I still do.

"Shall we go shell hunting?" he asked.

He placed the picture back on the side table reverently, smiled at Juvia, and headed for the door. Juvia hovered a moment more before the sound of footsteps signaled that she had followed after him.

Lyon wandered the beach leisurely, ambling down the water line and rescuing the prettier shells from the mud. He wasn't in any particular hurry tonight. The bracelets wouldn't take as much time or as many shells as the necklaces, and he already had most of what he needed. Mostly, he was content to watch Juvia's excitement as she rescued shells from the sand and showed them off proudly.

"Sherry used to like collecting shells too," he mused aloud. "When we were kids. Toby and Yuka and I thought it was silly and girly and teased her sometimes, but one day Gajeel made fun of her and we all jumped on him." Lyon chuckled at the memory. "I got a broken nose and we got in trouble for starting a fight, but I guess we were all kind of protective of her. Of all of us, really, but especially of her. She used to be kind of shy. Funny, these days she's a snarky little spitfire and always wins her own fights instead of letting us get away with teasing her."

The shell thing had been a good idea. Sherry didn't spend much time gathering shells these days, but he thought it might still mean something to her.

Juvia slowed, a frown tugging at her lips. Her blue eyes clouded over a stormy gray. Lyon opened his mouth to ask if she was alright, but she started forward again and this time she was limping horrendously.

"Your ankle! Come on, let's sit down and give you a break before heading home. I think we have more than enough shells."

He slung an arm around her waist and helped her a little ways up the beach, where they collapsed into the sand. Juvia sighed and offered him a sheepish smile, and they both turned their eyes to the waves.

Lyon's gaze wandered along the shoreline. He had walked along the water too many times to count in his life. As a child, Gray had always run along behind him on his shorter legs, calling for him to slow down, wait up. In the days before Gray had given up on so openly seeking his attention and approval, at least. All of those times blurred together in Lyon's mind in the way that mundane, continuously recurring chores often do, and he couldn't remember…

Had he ever paused and turned and waited for Gray to catch up?

He hoped he had, even once.

"Do you hate me?" he asked, the words slipping from between his lips on the faintest of sighs before he realized what he was saying. Juvia started in surprise and tore her gaze away from the ocean to stare at him. Lyon flushed and scrambled for a way to salvage his unexpected question. "I mean, I did cause you to break your ankle and I took your skin and–"

Juvia cut him off with a sharp shake of her head. Her eyes raged with the ferocity of an ocean storm, the hard determination of implacable waves, and Lyon couldn't breathe. Then she folded her hands as if in prayer or thanksgiving and bowed sharply at the waist in his direction, wavy curtains of soft blue hair falling forward to hang around her face.

"B-but–"

She shook her head again, and Lyon subsided.

"…Okay. You're right, I'm sorry. I get it."

She peeked up at him then, searching his face with eyes that were no longer fierce but uncertain, and must have found what she was looking for since she straightened up and smiled at him brightly. Lyon wasn't entirely sure why she was so grateful to him, but he was glad it eclipsed any resentment over the skin. It made him feel a little better, like maybe he was doing the right thing after all.

She did seem mostly content, cheerful and curious and industrious, at least when she didn't turn her melancholy on the sea. That had to count for something. Although…

"Are you lonely?" he blurted out.

She was always cooped up in the house alone, with only him for company in the evenings. And all the beach wandering and shell collecting and crafts and cleaning and cooking… He had assumed it was due to her need to be near the ocean and her gratitude for his help and just her own curiosity, but perhaps part of it was just that she was bored and lonely, isolated from her friends and home and any personal contact outside of Lyon. With no one to spend time with and nothing to do, no wonder she created hobbies and chores to fill her time.

Juvia wore that bemused expression again, but laughed silently and shook her head and leaned in to poke his chest.

Not with you, she seemed to say.

"Well, yeah, but you're on your own most of the day. And you can't go back out to sea yet, so your friends, your family, your sister…"

Juvia stared, and slowly the light faded from her eyes. Her smile turned a little softer, a little sadder, and she patted Lyon gently on the arm before turning her gaze back out to the ocean.

Lyon bit his lip as the idea sunk its teeth into his mind. "Would you…like to come to the party with me tomorrow?" Juvia turned back to him in surprise again, and he rushed on. "Everyone's curious to meet you. I mean, I've already told you about a lot of them, right? They know about you, but they don't know you're a selkie. We don't need to tell them that. But parties are fun, and maybe it would help to get out of the house for an evening and hang out with some new people. They're really mostly very nice, and maybe…"

Juvia was already nodding vigorously, eyes shining with excitement.

Lyon wasn't sure this was a great plan. He'd been avoiding setting Juvia and the townsfolk on a collision course for a reason. Partly, he was wary of what they might do or think if they realized she was a selkie. Partly, maybe there was a selfish part of him that wanted to keep Juvia and the grand adventure she represented to himself instead of sharing her with his friends. And, perhaps mostly, he was wary of what might happen when his normal, everyday life and temporary new life of adventure collided.

So no, he wasn't sure this was a good idea.

But seeing that light in Juvia's eyes made it seem like it was.